I.
"You have a father," Maman says, running pale fingers and silver comb through the raven's wing of Bellona's hair. "He is an Englishman, and has been accused of doing great evil."
"Did he do it?" Bellona asks, even though she knows the answer - Maman would not have wasted her time on a wizard unless he had a good heart, or at least, not an evil heart.
"No, darling," Maman says, setting aside the comb and setting her fingers to work, splitting Bellona's hair into two, and then each half into three, so she can twist it into two plaits, one to sit over each of her shoulders. "No, your father is an innocent man, but the English do not make use of the courts of which they are so proud, and so no one cares that he did not commit the crime."
Bellona is six, but she will remember this. The English courts do not work. The English do not believe in allowing innocent men a chance to defend themselves. The English, as any good Frenchwoman knows, are idiots.
Mostly, though, she will remember that her father, far away on windy, weeping Azkaban, is an innocent man.
II.
Her cousins mock her, behind her back.
She has three cousins, twins and one, all girls. They are all fully Veela, pale and silver and exquisite, as Maman and Grand-mère are, as all women of their line are. Apollonia is the tallest of the three, her twin Artemisia the cleverest, and delicate, dainty Jeanne is both the oldest and the most beautiful.
Jeanne is the most beautiful of all the women in their family.
Jeanne is the same age as Bellona, almost to the minute. Grand-mère was present at Jeanne's birth, but not at Bellona's, even though Maman's labour began before Tante Leto's.
When they were very small, Grand-mère used like to dress them to match, in gowns of white satin and silver lace. Jeanne, dreamlike Jeanne, looked like a moonbeam, like a perfect jewel. Bellona looked striking, but what is it to be striking against the beauty of a Veela?
Jeanne is never cruel, which makes it worse - Bellona cannot go to Maman and complain that Jeanne is lamenting that Bellona's hair is not bright, that her eyes are not violet-blue, that Bellona is taller and stockier than any of her cousins, than any of her aunts or Maman's cousins were as girls, because those things are true, and because Maman and Grand-mère lament over them as well.
It's the human in her, Grand-mère sighs, when she thinks Bellona cannot hear, and it never ceases to hurt. If the human in her is a defect, does her family only love half of her?
Bellona learns early to take heart in what few compliments she does earn. She is smarter than her cousins, she knows it, fluent of course in French and Finnish, but also in English and Spanish and Latin by the time she is ten. Maman enjoys languages, and Bellona inherited her knack. Oncle Anatole has taught her to ride, and to shoot a bow and arrow, and has begun teaching her to fence - she is strong, and likes to be strong, even if she will never fly without a broom beneath her.
Jeanne will fly, of course. Jeanne will do everything, because she is perfect, and Bellona is not.
Bellona's father, the Englishman, is innocent of his crimes. Jeanne's father, the Greek Veela who is almost a Lamia, really, is beautiful, and so will be forgiven all crimes. These are two very different things.
Striking and beautiful. Human and Veela. Similar, but not the same - and it is because of that crucial difference that Jeanne will always stand superior to Bellona, in the eyes of their family, and why Jeanne's sharp tongue will always be forgiven, while Bellona's bruised heart is a weakness.
III.
"Tell me, dearheart," Oncle Anatole says, while they are sharing lunch beneath the spreading branches of an old oak tree, trunk wrapped all around with shining green ivy. "Would you wish to know your father, if you had the chance?"
A letter came from Beauxbatons, delivered by a little Merlin falcon, a little Merlin falcon who fought with the neat little boreal owl who delivered a matching letter, in English, from far-off Hogwarts.
"Maman would not like it," Bellona says, fretful - Maman likes things less and less, Bellona is finding, from the way Bellona is growing even taller and is constantly in need of new shoes, to the way Bellona cannot sing so sweetly as Artemisia and Apollonia, never mind so sweetly as Jeanne. Maman does not like that Bellona's body is maturing more human than Veela, that her heart is weaker than a true Veela's would be, that she is not a true Veela.
"Juno dislikes a great many things," Oncle Anatole says. "This one, though, she must accept with better grace than she has the others."
Bellona feels her face flush, and looks down - but Oncle Anatole tips her face back up, and looks her in the eye. He is the most beautiful person in their family, because male Veela are rare and exquisite and treasured, but to her, he is thekindest person in their family, the only one who never thinks less of her simply for the black of her hair and the wizard's magic in her blood.
"Your mama would be better served defending you from Jeanne than lamenting your differences, ma poulette. I will speak with her, and if it is your wish, you will go to Hogwarts, across the water. Is that what you wish?"
In England, she will not be the poor half-human girl. She does not know her father's name, and so she cannot claim him and be shamed for him. She will be a Frenchwoman among Englishmen, true, but she can be just as haughty as Maman and the others when she wants to be, and surely that will preserve her from bullies.
"Will you come with me?" she asks. "As far as the train, at least?"
Oncle Anatole presses a kiss to her brow, smiling.
"Dearheart," he says, "how could you expect any less of me?"
IV.
Grand-mère will not speak to her the morning she and Maman prepare to leave for London, to go to this peculiar Diagon Alley the letter spoke of.
"London is no Paris," she whispers to Maman, keeping to French just in case someone overhears. Unlikely, between the noise of these Englishmen all around them and the deep hoods Maman insisted they wear, but she is nervous all the same. "Where are we to begin?"
"Let us order your robes first, ma petite," Maman says, "and from there, we will proceed, hmm?"
The wizard from the pub shows them through into the Alley, and Bellona's breath catches in her throat.
She has never seen quite so many tall hats in one place before. Her family do not wear such things, preferring cowls and hoods, and those tall hats and the drab colours of the robes filling the street before them are so peculiar that she almost turns tail and flees.
But she is a de Poitiers. She is brave.
"This way, Bellona," Maman says, in English, and throws back her hood. "Stand tall, little one, and let down your hood."
Bellona does as she is bid, and pointedly does not flinch when people begin to point at them. Instead, she locks her elbow with Maman's, and matches her step for step as a path clears ahead of them when Maman begins to move.
V.
Madam Malkin is, to Bellona's disappointment, English.
Her robes are drab, too - plain black, standard issue for Hogwarts, she is informed, and a huge black cloak with plain silver clasps. She enquires after a brighter lining, for a splash of colour, or even a little fur for the hood, but Madam Malkin only laughs, as if Bellona has made some joke or other. Maman is frowning, not at Bellona for once, and she does not cease frowning as they march from shop to shop, greeted by an increasingly familiar combination of awe and disdain in each.
Maman is so beautiful that it offends people. Sometimes, they receive similar welcomes in Lyon or Toulouse, but never in Paris - and is London not supposed to be Paris' equal?
"These English," Maman says, a sneer curling her lip, "they are not used to truly beautiful women, are they?"
Bellona dreads to think what they will make of Oncle Anatole when he brings her to the train, for he is twice as lovely at least as Maman.
"Pardon me," a tall, lean, fair-haired Englishman says, appearing suddenly at their table in the Leaking Cauldron. There is a boy beside him, perhaps Bellona's age, a little smaller than her, with the same silver-fair hair. "Might I introduce myself?"
Maman looks the man up and down with the sort of derisive disinterest she usually reserves for les Melusines.
"You are married to the mad one's sister," she says. "I require no introduction."
Bellona stiffens - Maman is never usually so rude! - but the man laughs. He laughs.
And then he sits down, directing the boy to sit also.
"Your daughter bears a striking resemblance to the mad one, as you so eloquently name her," he says. "So perhaps you would be best served to find your manners, madam, lest the truth of that resemblance find its way into common knowledge."
Now it is Maman who is sitting stiff in her chair, and Bellona is relieved that the boy is just as confused as she feels.
Maman extends her hand, which is even more confusing.
"Juno de Poitiers," she says. "My daughter, Bellona."
The man smiles.
"Lucius Malfoy," he says. "My son, Draco. He will be a classmate of your daughter's."
The boy's eyes narrow, and Bellona frowns. She already does not like him, and hopes she will not be stuck with him too often, if they are truly to be classmates.
VI.
"The mad one," Maman tells her later that night, is cousin to Bellona's father, the innocent Englishman.
"Do not admit to being his daughter, no matter what," Maman tells her, fierce as only a Veela can be. "But your papa's name is Sirius. Sirius Black. People think him a murderer."
Maman takes a worn, folded newspaper from her handbag, and presses it into Bellona's hands.
"This is what people think of him," she says, "but they are wrong. I know him, and while there is a darkness in him, it is not this. Never this."
Bellona reads the newspaper, reads of laughter in the face of all that death, and understands what it was that drew Maman to a wizard. A darkness indeed!
She wishes Oncle Anatole were here. He has a soft heart, too, and might have more sense to give her in the face of this madness than Maman does, with her staunch certainty. Even if he is without sense for her, he might offer comfort. Maman never thinks to.
VII.
Oncle Anatole is on edge when they emerge through the phantom wall onto the platform. There are pinfeathers showing at his temples, tawny against the silver-white of his hair, and Bellona clutches tighter to his arm, in hopes of calming him.
"I still do not understand why I couldn't simply fly you to this school of theirs," he grumbles, pushing her trolley for her and scowling at everyone who looks at them strangely. A great many people do so, because Oncle Anatole is so beautiful, and because of her owl. Blanchefleur is beautiful, and sweet-tempered, and gleaming, bone-white. A curiosity, Oncle Anatole had said when he unveiled her. An albino barn owl for the dark-haired Veela girl - a matched pair, Jeanne had fluttered, and Grand-mère had laughed at Jeanne's charm and wit.
"Please don't be angry, Anatole," she pleads, and he softens immediately. "Please, they will already think me strange for being French, and for my name, and-"
"And for being so pretty," he says, drawing to a slow halt. "I am sorry, ma chouette, I will calm myself."
Everyone else on the platform seems to have family to part with, or friends to greet, and Bellona feels very small, and very lonely. She almost wishes Jeanne were here, if only because she knows Jeanne's meanness and pettiness in a way she does not know anything of this place.
"Promise me something, dearheart," Oncle Anatole says, once he has secured her trunk and Blanchefleur is perched neatly on her shoulder. "Promise me something very important."
"Anything, Anatole," she swears, because he would never ask something of her that he knows she would not willingly give.
"Do not let these children make you feel small," he says, and for once, he is entirely serious. "You are as good as any of them and better than most. Do not forget that."
VIII.
The musty old hat debates over her for a whole minute, speaking in French to suggest Ravenclaw and in English to suggest Slytherin, but never Gryffindor.
She wonders at that - she has looked into her innocent-but-judged-guilty papa, and he was a Gryffindor. Surely these things run in families? Doesn't everything?
She sits at the Slytherin table with the hair on the back of her neck standing on end, nervous of the way the older students watch her - the boy from Diagon Alley is there, mouth twisted and nose turned up in a sneer, and she wonders if anyone else sees the resemblance she supposedly bears to her papa's mad cousin. She prays not.
A tall, slim boy who is as dark as Bellona is pale sits beside her, regarding the rest of their new housemates with the same wary uncertainty Bellona feels, but it fades slightly when she smiles at him.
He is nearly as pretty as she is. Somehow, that makes her feel safer. More at home.
"Belle," she offers, because Maman admitted that her full name might seem a little overbearing with her new classmates. "And you?"
"Blaise," he returns, smiling just a little. "Where in France are you from?"
IX.
Professor Snape is loathesome.
According to Blaise, this is a wholly uncommon opinion among Slytherins, who benefit so much from Snape's favouritism and nepotism, but Bellona will not be moved.
Snape looks at her as though he knows her truth, and hates her for it.
A shame, really, because she very much likes Potions - almost as much as she does Transfiguration. Professor McGonagall tells her that she has a knack, and Bellona is so thrilled that she almost cries. No one has ever offered her praise without prompting before, save for Oncle Anatole, and it is taking some getting used to.
She does wonder - is her knack for Transfiguration a quiet manifestation of her Veela blood? She will never truly transform as Maman and the others do, but she can transform everything else Professor McGonagall puts in front of her without particular effort.
Snape, though, never offers her praise. He never throws points at her the way he does her housemates, never holds her up as an example to put down the Gryffindors. He ignores her, mostly, except sometimes when he thinks she isn't looking, and he looks at her as if she is diseased.
"It could be that he hates Veela," Blaise points out reasonably, frowning over his History of Magic book toward the other boys in their class, Malfoy and Crabbe and Goyle. Bellona will not honour them by using their given names, not when they laugh and mock her accent and call her Ball, as though that is somehow amusing.
"No one in England knows enough of Veela to hate them," Bellona says, carefully rotating the outermost circle of the starchart Maman sent last week. It has made her Astronomy homework so much easier. "How can anyone hate something they don't know?"
"Very easily," Blaise says, knowing and wry, and Bellona feels ashamed. Of course Blaise understands that better than she does, and she should not have spoken so selfishly. "Ignore him, Belle, he is only one man. He is nothing to you."
X.
The soft, quiet boy with the toad who is in her Potions class approaches her one day at lunchtime, while she is sitting alone by the lake, wishing for Anatole's company.
"You're a Black, aren't you?" he says, and she can see how fear is making him sweat.
"If I am," she says, hoping that he is not about to tell the whole school her hidden truth, "it is by accident, and I know nothing of it."
"You look like her," the boy - Longbottom? Neville? - says, hands shaking and jaw set. "Bellatrix Lestrange."
"I- I do not know who that is," Bellona admits. "Forgive me-"
"She stole my parents," Neville Longbottom says, "and you look just like her."
The mad one. Oh, Maman! Why did you not warn me that I look like an evil woman?
"I don't know her, Neville," Bellona says. "If I am related to her, it must be through my father - and I have never met him. I am not even sure of his name."
Neville Longbottom hesitates, fear leaching into confusion.
Please believe me, Bellona prays, putting on her best approximation of Jeanne's guileless innocence. Please, please do not ruin this.